How containers and microservices change security

Wei Lien Dang • InfoWorld

Today organizations large and small are exploring the adoption of cloud-native software technologies. “Cloud-native” refers to an approach that packages software within standardized units called containers, arranges those units into microservices that interface with each other to form applications, and ensures that running applications are fully automated for greater speed, agility, and scalability.

Because this approach fundamentally changes how software is built, deployed, and run, it also fundamentally changes how software needs to be protected. Cloud-native applications and infrastructure create several new challenges for security professionals, who will need to establish new security programs that support their organization’s use of cloud-native technologies.

Let’s take a look at those challenges, and then we’ll discuss a number of best practices security teams should adopt to address them. First the challenges:

Traditional security infrastructure lacks container visibility. Most existing host-based and network security tools do not have the ability to monitor or capture container activity. These tools were built to secure single operating systems or the traffic between host machines rather than the applications running above, resulting in a loss of visibility into container events, system interactions, and inter-container traffic.

Attack surfaces can change rapidly. Cloud-native applications are made up of many smaller components called microservices that are highly distributed, each of which must be individually audited and secured. Because these applications are designed to be provisioned and scaled by orchestration systems, their attack surfaces change constantly – and far faster than traditional monolithic applications.

Distributed data flows require continuous monitoring. Containers and microservices are designed to be lightweight and to interconnect programmatically with each other or external cloud services. This generates large volumes of fast-moving data across the environment to be continuously monitored for indicators of attack and compromise as well as unauthorized data access or exfiltration.

Detection, prevention, and response must be automated. The speed and volume of events generated by containers overwhelms current security operations workflows. The ephemeral life spans of containers also make it difficult to capture, analyze, and determine the root cause of incidents. Effective threat protection means automating data collection, filtering, correlation, and analysis to be able to react fast enough to new incidents.

Faced with these new challenges, security professionals will need to establish new security programs that support their organization’s use of cloud-native technologies. Naturally, your security program should address the entire lifecycle of cloud-native applications, which can be split into two distinct phases: the build and deploy phase, and the runtime phase. Each of these phases has a different set of security considerations that must be addressed to form a comprehensive security program.

Securing container builds and deployment

Security for the build and deploy phase focuses on applying controls to developer workflows and continuous integration and deployment pipelines to mitigate the risk of security issues that may arise after containers have been launched. These controls can incorporate the following guidelines and best practices:

Keep images as small as possible. A container image is a lightweight executable that packages application code and its dependencies. Restricting each image to only what is essential for software to run minimizes the attack surface for every container launched from the image. Starting with minimal operating system base images such as Alpine Linux can reduce image sizes and make images easier to manage.

Scan images for known issues. As images get built, they should be checked for known vulnerabilities and exposures. Each file system layer that makes up an image can be scanned and the results compared to a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database that is regularly updated. Development and security teams can then address discovered vulnerabilities before the images are used to launch containers.

Digitally sign images. Once images have been built, their integrity should be verified prior to deployment. Some image formats utilize unique identifiers called digests that can be used to detect when image contents have changed. Signing images with private keys provides cryptographic assurances that each image used to launch containers was created by a trusted party.

Harden and restrict access to the host OS. Since containers running on a host share the same OS, it is important to ensure that they start with an appropriately restricted set of capabilities. This can be achieved using kernel security features and modules such as Seccomp, AppArmor, and SELinux.

Specify application-level segmentation policies. Network traffic between microservices can be segmented to limit how they connect to each other. However, this needs to be configured based on application-level attributes such as labels and selectors, abstracting away the complexity of dealing with traditional network details such as IP addresses. The challenge with segmentation is having to define policies upfront that restrict communications without impacting the ability of containers to communicate within and across environments as part of their normal activity.

Protect secrets to be used by containers. Microservices interfacing with each other frequently exchange sensitive data such as passwords, tokens, and keys, referred to as secrets. These secrets can be accidentally exposed if they are stored in images or environment variables. As a result, several orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes have integrated secrets management, ensuring that secrets are only distributed to the containers that use them, when they need them.

Several leading container platforms and tools from companies such as Docker, Red Hat, and CoreOS provide some or all of these capabilities. Getting started with one of these options is the easiest way to ensure robust security during the build and deploy phase.

However, build and deployment phase controls are still insufficient to ensuring a comprehensive security program. Preempting all security incidents before containers start running is not possible for the following reasons. First, vulnerabilities will never be fully eliminated and new ones are exploited all the time. Second, declarative container metadata and network segmentation policies cannot fully anticipate all legitimate application activity in a highly distributed environment. And third, runtime controls are complex to use and often misconfigured, leaving applications susceptible to threats.

Securing containers at runtime

Runtime phase security encompasses all the functions – visibility, detection, response, and prevention – required to discover and stop attacks and policy violations that occur once containers are running. Security teams need to triage, investigate, and identify the root causes of security incidents in order to fully remediate them. Here are the key aspects of successful runtime phase security:

Instrument the entire environment for continuous visibility. Being able to detect attacks and policy violations starts with being able to capture all activity from running containers in real time to provide an actionable “source of truth.” Various instrumentation frameworks exist to capture different types of container-relevant data. Selecting one that can handle the volume and speed of containers is critical.

Correlate distributed threat indicators. Containers are designed to be distributed across compute infrastructure based on resource availability. Given that an application may be comprised of hundreds or thousands of containers, indicators of compromise may be spread out across large numbers of hosts, making it harder to pinpoint those that are related as part of an active threat. Large-scale, fast correlation is needed to determine which indicators form the basis for particular attacks.

Analyze container and microservices behavior. Microservices and containers enable applications to be broken down into minimal components that perform specific functions and are designed to be immutable. This makes it easier to understand normal patterns of expected behavior than in traditional application environments. Deviations from these behavioral baselines may reflect malicious activity and can be used to detect threats with greater accuracy.

Augment threat detection with machine learning. The volume and speed of data generated in container environments overwhelms conventional detection techniques. Automation and machine learning can enable far more effective behavioral modeling, pattern recognition, and classification to detect threats with increased fidelity and fewer false positives. Beware solutions that use machine learning simply to generate static whitelists used to alert on anomalies, which can result in substantial alert noise and fatigue.

Intercept and block unauthorized container engine commands. Commands issued to the container engine, e.g., Docker, are used to create, launch, and kill containers as well as run commands inside of running containers. These commands can reflect attempts to compromise containers, meaning it is essential to disallow any unauthorized ones.

Automate actions for response and forensics. The ephemeral life spans of containers mean that they often leave very little information available for incident response and forensics. Further, cloud-native architectures typically treat infrastructure as immutable, automatically replacing impacted systems with new ones, meaning containers may be gone by the time of investigation. Automation can ensure information is captured, analyzed, and escalated quickly enough to mitigate the impact of attacks and violations.

Cloud-native software built on container technologies and microservices architectures is rapidly modernizing applications and infrastructure. This paradigm shift forces security professionals to rethink the programs required to effectively protect their organizations. A comprehensive security program for cloud-native software addresses the entire application lifecycle as containers are built, deployed, and run. By implementing a program using the guidelines above, organizations can build a secure foundation for container infrastructures and the applications and services that run on them.

Wei Lien Dang is VP of product at StackRox, a security company that provides adaptive threat protection for containers. Previously, he was head of product at CoreOS and held senior product management roles for security and cloud infrastructure at Amazon Web Services, Splunk, and Bracket Computing.

This article was written by Wei Lien Dang from InfoWorld and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.